Ana Alonso-Minutti

Ana R. Alonso-Minutti is Associate Professor of Music and faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at UNM. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in music from the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, and continued her studies at the University of California, Davis, where she received MA and PhD degrees in musicology.

Alonso-Minutti’s scholarship focuses on experimental and avant-garde expressions, music traditions from Mexico and the US-Mexico border, and music history pedagogy. Moreover, she is interested in exploring the intersections of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality in music/sound practices. Her research has been published in academic journals in the United States (Latin American Music Review, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Brújula), Mexico (Heterofonía, Discanto, Pauta), and Argentina (Revista Argentina de Musicología), and she has presented her work in various conferences and institutions across the Americas (Canada, U.S., Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil), and Europe (Finland, Romania). Currently, she is co-editing the volume Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, forthcoming by Oxford University Press, and her book Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico is under contract by Oxford University Press. As an extension of her written scholarship, she directed and produced the video documentary Cubos y permutaciones: plástica, música y poesía de vanguardia en México, which was exhibited at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City in 2017.

Prior to joining the University of New Mexico in 2013, Alonso-Minutti was Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Texas. She has taught large undergraduate non-music major courses, upper-division music major courses, courses within the Honors College, and master’s and doctoral-level seminars. In her classes, she blends musicological and ethnomusicological inquiry into the study of contemporary musical practices across the Americas while engaging in decolonial theories, cultural aesthetics, transculturation, gender/sexuality studies, border consciousness, and musical activism.

Alonso-Minutti bases her teaching philosophy and practice on four core values that she aims to instill in her students: passion, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and perseverance. In her courses, she fosters a learning environment that incorporates a multidisciplinary approach to the study of music and a social contextualization of artistic practices that engages students’ interests and experiences. By discussing the complex networks that constitute any musical practice, she aspires to promote intellectual sensitivity to different artistic expressions across the globe. Her goal is to provide students opportunities to develop an independent thinking capacity that embraces a critical perspective while integrating multicultural differences. Being born and raised in Puebla, Mexico, Alonso-Minutti engages in US academic life by transitioning among different worldviews while establishing fruitful interactions between them. This has granted her the ability to build bridges of understanding among multicultural communities of students.